i have fastforwarded a month and a few thousand miles as writing retrospectively seemed a bit retrospeculative and so 'here' now means hong kong and 'now' is the here and...
things were going dead steady here and i didn't have much to write about but then we have had a right time of it in the last 10 days or so, visiting the city in which my biological grandma grew up and then the village in which my grandfathers first wife lives, and then in the last few days a little jaunt to the excellent nation that calls itself taiwan (and china calls 'chinese taipei'- bastards)
here no-one really tells me what is about to happen, where we are going or who we are due to meet until things present themselves, which totally confuddled me at first but now i quite enjoy. my dad will say we are 'going for a walk' and then we will end up in the flat of some friend or relation and 20 members of their extended family, a loud TV, a few old people amiably shuffling about in their pyjamas and various carcasses that we are presented with and which we eat whilst everyone watches and comments in cantonese on my chopstick technique (which now i have got DOWN). This happened in my grandmas city, when we stumbled into a bustling flat full of 4 generations of cooing family, the space full to the brim of love and laughter and an electric mahjong table. it was so very nice in contrast to all the garish commercialism and fake nokias on the streets outside and the matriach of the evening's initial gambit was 'your cousin ate 7 crabs. here are 7 crabs'.
The TV in the background showed the opening to the Guangdong (city in southern china and centre of the chinese shoe industry, and hence full of loads of duct-tape holding african importers) Asian games 2010. Like the Beijing olympics and the shanghai expo, the ceremony was an orgy of syncronised dances, huge structures and computer enhanced fireworks. this is the china that its government wants the world, and perhaps even more so its own citizens, to see. it took its place among reports of the development of the 'prestige project' of super fast railway building, chinas purported dominance of the Seoul G20 and the odd man run over by a steamroller that constitutes domestic 'news' coverage. but let me hold my critique of china for another moment and get on with it...
The next day we visited the graves of my grandmother's parents, set in sparse grassland an hour out of the city. they were in seperate locations, each one marked with a large circular double ring of concrete (in a figure of 8 shape- the size of the circles denotes the prestige of the family) with a small, tightly engraved tombstone at the head of each, as well as a little plinth to burn offerings (anything burnt, including cash, goes directly to the deceased in the afterlife), all conforming to feng shui principles. My great grandfathers' grave showed his first and last names, his home town, and a few apparently untranslatable sentiments. My grandma's, on the other hand, does not have her own name but only those of her children and her married name, as is/was the custom. Indeed the character for 'woman' in chinese can be seperated into two constituent parts 'son' and 'good'. hooray for the wisdom of confunctionism.
Nearby a small village temple with beautiful carvings and incense lit by invisible worshippers felt much more sacred than the huge statues of buddha or jesus in other, larger places of worship i have visited. across china there are small buddhist shrines and temples (as well as numerous shrines to local deities in houses, shops, restaurants) and for me it is the human peace that is found in these places that gives it the aura. i am perhaps slowly realising that my lack of belief in reincarnation and the worshipping of anyone precludes me from calling myself a buddhist, but the buddha's doctines certainly hold a lot of weight as a way to live a hearty life.
my fondness of the way the chinese flavour their pigs also is a bit of a barrier, and that night i felt like obelix as the huge family of the night before joined us in a 'farmers restaurant' and helped me eat a medium sized pig (and three chickens, and loads of wild veggies, and tarrow covered in sugar), just out of the underground oven. i knawed and sucked and drank lots of beer and then was presented with the brains of the pig, which tasted quite a lot like the fatty cheeks of the big fish of the other week, except a bit more, er, porky.
chinese people have been through many years of turmoil and food has been scarce for lots of people, lots of the time (one history book i read stated that in the late 1800s there were reports of mothers swapping babies with each other so they wouldn;'t have to eat their own), and so it makes perfect sense that they have developed ways of making every bit of nearly every animal into a tasty dish. in addition to that pig brain i have eaten pig ear, pig grotter, congealed pigs blood, ducks blood, chicken foot soup, shark fin soup, giant snails, frogs, peppered horse leg, dog (i didn't ask if it was pedigree), turtle, terrapin, pidgeon, sand worms, salted rice worms, jelly fish, hammer crab, razor clam and, the most curious delicacy of all, the foetus of a killer bee, which i watched being taken from its little hive cocoon and which was like a sack of pollen-scented jelly in the mouth. the dog thing is quite interesting, as it is a delicacy in the same cities in which the economic boom and love for all things western has compelled affluent city folk to groom, love and cherish these cat-sized dogs that are no use to anyone and treated like children. and in restaurants fish kept carefully for feng shui purposes swim next to equally beautiful fish waiting to be chopped and steamed and served with ginger and spring onion. i will leave the analysis/judgement to you, but suffice to say i am visibly putting on weight.
the next day we headed and to my grandfathers village, tucked away on a side road on the edge of a rapidly-growing city. This was the part of my whole trip in china that i had been looking forward to most. According to my dad there are only three surnames in the village, leung (the one i would have been if i had taken my dad's name) is the dominant one, and in theory we can be traced back to the founder of the village who was apparently quite a legend. my grandfather, not thinking i could handle village life, had booked us into a hotel, which i was a bit gutted about, but i persuaded them over a sumptuous welcoming banquet, which it must have taken several people all day to prepare, that we should all stay in the family home the next night.
there were loads of things to be picked apart from what i saw that night and the next, even though no-one spoke a word of english and didn't even seem to understand my scantily-toned mandarin. my granddad seemed much more at home here than alone in his hong kong flat- he was the oldest and this was the house he was born into, with big photos of his mother and father on the wall. he was clearly orchestrating the event of our homecoming (my dad hadn't been there for a few years either) and everyone seemed to be really pleased to have him, and us, there. i sort of picked up the backstory - my grandfather, who was in the nationalist army (the one defeated by mao) had an arranged marriage to his first wife but then for some reason had left after only a few months and married my grandma, and then they had escaped to hong kong when the nationalists were defeated. he had 6 children and worked as a coolie (dock labourer) and night porter for up to 20 hours per day to feed my dad and his siblings.
for 30 years contact between hong kong and china was almost impossible (if someone in china got a letter from hong kong they would be questioned by the police and often charged with spying, which could lead to execution), but after 1979 things became easier, and in the 80s he returned to his village to find that his first wife, whom he had abandoned, had stayed single, looked after the house (living on handouts from other villagers), apparently waiting for him to come back or waiting to die. it must have been a pretty emotional moment when he found her there. he then proceeded to rebuild the house (it was, i was told proudly, the highest house in the village for a time) and support his first wife, and returning every few months just like he was doing now.
his first wife was super pleased to meet me, and did as old people seem to do- ignore the fact i don't understand what they are saying and just talk at me animatedly. which was great and after a while i did the same back. the women here seem so much less reserved and more intuitive than the men, at least to me.
she was tiny and hunchbacked with a kind of cackling voice, and her and my grandfather seemed to really enjoy each others company. so i was seeing this, i was seeing how my father acted in his home village, i was doing some intense environment absorbtion and seeing how village lift ticked, compared to zimbabwe and india (details different, themes so similar). i try to stay away from cliche and over romanticisation but it is hard cos they are often true- by and large people struggle and are happy unless they are hungry or lovesick, and the conversation is of things that can be touched and kissed and eaten, and an unquestioned god/diety/ancestor that is just there and must be revered. things make sense- the village is centred on a huge banyan tree and a well, with irrigation ditches leading to fish ponds around the village. people wake up at dawn and eat at dusk, and everyone, regardless of age, helps to move the rice from field to plate. old people are respected because they have the most wisdom, and if people are angry they shout and fight and then get the fuck on with whatever they have to do.
unlike mugabe though, the chinese authorities at least paid off the people it took land from. cities are only allowed to build on 'new' land on the edge of cities, which makes the farmers who have been there generations and then sell it to them suddenly landless, with some money, and with the new status of 'city dwellers' rather than 'farmers', which allows them a far greater freedom. it seemed that everyone had used their money and freedom to build taller houses and indulge more readily in their tobacco pipes (which had to be direct decendents of the opium pipes that were ubiquitous in china before the commies).
my insistance on staying at the home on the second night paid off, and my dad was the happiest and least stressed i have seen him the entire trip, talking a bit about his childhood and what is important to him as we sat by the fish pond outside the house with beer and mbira. it also meant i could get up at dawn with my good friend henry, who joined us for this trip, and watch the village swing into action. suddenly the little rivers at the side of the fields made sense (buckets were used to water the plants... ). a man with a stick tried unsuccessfully and it has to be said very comically to herd a gaggle of gabbling geese across a road. the market, on a bridge between our village and the next, salted fish, repaired bicycle tyres and stared blankly at the two strangers passing by. posters of mao could be seen in the odd living room, but peoples' attention was clearly much more focused on the rice grains drying on the concrete basketball pitch and the greying sky that would force them to sack it all up again.
like much of my trip- no revelations, no massive emotions, but a slow absorbtion of a culture and a family that is no longer abstract. and lots and lots of food.
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